About

Nicoletta De Vincenzi

AI, leadership and human judgement

Origins of the research

In 2009 Nicoletta De Vincenzi defended a doctoral thesis at Sapienza University in Rome on advertising communication as a lever of competitive differentiation in the automotive industry, based on content analysis. The research question was which words actually create difference between brands selling comparable products. That same year, she joined Google.

It was the year those same words stopped being merely content and became a market: keywords went to auction, and an algorithm began deciding which message reached which person. Over the following fifteen years, at Google, Meta and TikTok, she watched that mechanism extend far beyond advertising, until it began producing decisions no board could still inspect.

«L'intelligenza che resta umana» comes from there. It is not a book against automation: it is the same question she started with — who decides, and on what basis — posed at an incomparably larger scale.

Nicoletta De Vincenzi studies the relationship between artificial intelligence, leadership and decision-making.

Through research, teaching and advisory, she helps organisations and leaders design decision systems in which artificial intelligence strengthens human judgement without replacing it.

She built her career across Italy, Ireland, the UAE, Switzerland and California, holding international leadership roles at Google, Meta and TikTok.

Today she teaches at LUMSA and works with boards, leadership teams and universities.